Tuesday, September 26, 2017

Stretch roles are very popular these days as a development tool especially for high-potential employees. They provide an opportunity for accelerated learning. They can also lead to significant value creation that can benefit both the organization and the credentials of the employee.

So what is the problem? It is just that we often tend to be too ambitious when it comes to the degree of stretch in a stretch role. Hence we end up creating a 'designed to fail role' (with an impossible degree of stretch) instead of a stretch role. When we move a top talent into that role the result is often failure to meet the role expectations. If not handled properly, this can also end up as a 'career-limiting move' with the confidence and the credentials of the top talent getting adversely affected. So its is very important to differentiate between a 'stretch role' and a 'designed to fail' role and to get the degree of stretch in the role correct. Also there must be a clear exit plan (e.g. a defined timeframe in which the employee would be moved out of the stretch role doesn't work out).

There is one important exception to this. It is possible that many of the employees who are classified as 'top talent' haven't really experienced failure in their life & careers (or have become experts in sidestepping failure). This can limit their capability for 'double-loop learning' as they haven't yet been forced (by failure) to examine their underlying values, assumptions and mental models. In such a case a 'designed to fail' role might not be a bad idea so long as sufficient support systems (e.g. coaching to facilitate double-loop learning from the failure) and safety nets (to ensure that the failure is not catastrophic for either the organization or the career of the individual) have been put in place!

Hence, stretch roles are a valuable development tools if we design them correctly. We must always be careful to ensure that in our enthusiasm to stretch the (high-potential) employee we don't end up putting them in career-limiting roles!

Talent
Management is a domain that is becoming increasingly maddening for HR
professionals and for business leaders. The career paths that we create for
employees with so much love and effort become are seldom followed (See Career planning and the myth of Sisyphus). Skillsets
and roles that we have invested so heavily in become redundant. Increasingly
fewer number of employees look at their current organization as a career destination (See Crazy HR for crazy times).
Frequent changes in strategy, reorganizations and rapid scaling up &
downsizing in workforce are making talent management resemble the game of ‘Calvinball’
where you make the rules up as you go along!

When
the reality doesn’t suit us we are tempted to use the bricks of delusions to
create a world that affirms what we would like to believe. This article is an attempt
to look at some of the fundamental delusions (assumptions) in the talent
management practice and to explore some of the possibilities to overcome those
delusions.

Delusion 1: Talent can be managed

Most
of our talent management practices indicate the underlying assumption that
talent can be managed in the same manner as any other resource. The problem is
that talent comes with problematic parts like head and heart (and probably,
soul) in addition to hands and legs. Also, talent, at least good talent,
manages the organization as much as the organization manages the talent. It is
a curious feature of human nature that we are more keen to manage than to be
managed. Thus, the traditional ‘plan – implement – review - control’ approach to
management doesn’t work very well when it comes to talent management. A
more appropriate approach to management would be
‘understand-predict-engage-facilitate’ when it comes to talent management. This
requires developing deeper understanding of the human nature and human behavior
in the workplace context, of the evolving employee preferences and of the enabling
structures and choice architectures that can ‘attract’ employee behavior to
desirable patterns. This would help talent mangers designing initiatives like
‘mass career customization’ that enable talent to manage themselves facilitated
by a clearly defined set of options and implications of those options.

Delusion 2: Talent management is an
annual event

In
many organizations, talent management is an annual ritual that focuses on
creating career & development plans for the employees and succession plans
for critical positions. After this we go through the rest of year believing
that our work or at least most of it has been done. The trouble here is that
these plans crash-land into everyday business reality with very limited
survival rate.

In
a rapidly changing business and people context, the progress against these
plans should be monitored periodically and changes to the plans should be made
where required. The best practice is to have at least one formal review every
quarter. This need not be an elaborate and time-consuming affair. All that is
required is to do a quick check on two things: whether the action points (role changes,
development actions etc.) that were scheduled for the intervening period are on
track and whether there are any significant changes to the business or people.

Delusion 3: Talent management can be
done in a standalone manner

Often,
we tend to look at talent management as a standalone HR process. There are two
basic problems with this. First, talent management is not an HR only process.
Second, talent management can’t exist in a vacuum.To
be effective, talent management has to be integrated with the business planning
and workforce planning processes, with the talent implications of the business
strategy being the starting point for talent management. The best practice is
to begin talent review meetings with a structured discussion on the immediate and
long term talent implications of the business strategy and plan, the talent
gaps and challenges based on the same and the talent action plan to remedy the
gaps. All discussions about talent movements and talent development should be
done keeping this as the base.Another
important aspect here is to closely integrate talent management to the Learning
& Development and Performance Management processes.

Delusion 4: Talent management is all
about managing high-potentials

In
many organizations, almost the entire focus of talent management is on
identifying and developing high-potential employees. It is true that
high-potential employees can create a much higher business impact, as compared
to average talent, especially when there in critical roles. However, we would
be deluding ourselves if we think that the organization runs on only
high-potentials.

High-potentials
form only a small percentage of the overall employee population. Achieving
adequate levels of validity and reliability for the high-potential
identification process has been one of the perennial problems in talent
management and this makes an exclusive focus on those high-potentials a very
risky approach. Yes, there would be some talent that needs to be managed out of
the organization. For the all the other talent in the organization, talent
management should offer a compelling value proposition. Yes, segmenting this
population and customizing the value proposition for each of the segments is a
best practice. One such segment, apart from high-potentials, that merit extra
focus and investment is high-performers in critical roles.

Delusion 5: Talent can read the mind
of the organization

It
has often been observed that an employee realizes how valuable she was to the
organization and what great plans the organization had prepared for her only
after she submits his resignation. This brings us to our next delusion – that
talent can read the mind of the organization, especially when it comes to good
things. Ironically, employees often have a more accurate idea on the potential
risks for them in the organization than the potential opportunities! The
best practice here is not to communicate labels or titles, like high-potential
or top talent, to the employees. It is to communicate how the organization
looks at the employee at this point and the actions that the organization
intends to take subject to the employee keeping his side of the bargain, like
maintaining a certain performance level and consistently exhibiting a defined
set of behaviors.Of course, the
organization should not make promises that it won’t be able to keep.

Delusion 6: On the job development
would happen automatically

This
is a very convenient collective delusion for talent managers! The script is
something like this: The organization adopts the best practices of the 70:20:10
approach to employee development which correctly assumes that less than 10% of
the learning takes place through formal training ad that most of the learning
takes place through on-the-job- experiences (70%) and through coaching and
interactions (20%).This finding can be used
as an excuse for 'cutting training budgets’ and for ‘absolving HR managers of
their responsibility in talent development’ without establishing any concrete
mechanism for facilitating the learning through job experiences and
interactions'.

Unfortunately,
learning through job experiences and interactions does not happen automatically
as it requires deliberate planning, practice and facilitating in-depth
reflection to derive learning from the experience. Thus there is a need to put
in place a mechanism to structure, facilitate and track this type of learning.
For example, 'the way a job is structured' is a critical factor in deriving
learning through on-the-job experience. This calls for an intervention at the
job design level to ensure that the jobs have sufficient responsibility,
authority and scope. 'Job rotation' and 'special projects' also offer high
learning potential. This would require that the organization puts in place
policies that encourage job rotation and assigning people systematically to
special projects. Experience maps can be designed to highlight the most
important experiences to develop towards a particular role. Manager capability
building is essential to enable them to help the employees to plan &
execute the developmental experiences and to derive more learning from the
experiences through coaching.

Delusion 7: Talent Management is only
about long -term employees

Often,
we assume that the talent management should focus only on those employees who
are likely to stay on for a long time in the organization. This has become a
delusion in an environment where the average tenure of the employees in a
particular organization are reducing and when the employees who stay on for a
long time are often not the best talent. So
what makes more sense is to assume that the organization would be handling only
a limited (often very limited) part of the career in the case of most of the
employees and to design talent management strategies & processes that would
enable the employees to contribute within that limited time. Of course, making
a focused attempt to increase the time that certain segments of the employees
(e.g. high-potentials and high-performers in critical roles) spend in the
organization is definitely worthwhile.

So
why do we say that these seven are a perfect set of delusions? Let me just say
that the number 7 is considered to be a perfect number in many cultures and
some even associate mystical qualities to it. While this could also qualify as
an assumption (delusion!), overcoming the seven delusions discussed above do
give us a good starting point in taking a fresh look at what we do in the
domain of talent management. While perfect solutions don’t exist, by being more
aware of our delusions and the approaches to overcome them, we can definitely
be more effective in our craft and also be saner and happier!

'Creating a high-performance culture' is a phrase that
adorns many a corporate presentation, made by both Business and HR Leaders. Once you have spoken about whatever else you wanted to say about your
business strategy and plan adding this magic phrase, 'creating a high-performance
culture', seem to give it a nice 'human touch' and demonstrates your commitment to
facilitating the unfolding of human potential in your organization!

So, what is the problem? Just because something looks good
on PowerPoint slides, we can’t assume that it won’t work in real life. The
problem begins when we start asking questions. Is there really something like a
high-performance culture? Does it remain constant across organizations? Is it a
naturally occurring phenomenon or is it something that can be created? If it
can be created, what kind of creation is required? Once created, can it
be sustained? It is when we try to answer these questions we come to the
paradox mentioned in the title of this discussion.

An issue becomes a paradox when there are multiple opinions the
issue, each of which appears to be true, but they seem to be in conflict with
one another. In this discussion, we will look at the various perspectives
that exist regarding high-performance cultures and try to make some sense out
of them. Let’s start with some of the
perspectives:

High-performance
culture is the ultimate source of competitive advantage and hence developing a
high-performance culture should be given the highest priority

High-performance
culture is just a fad. It sounds good. But it is very difficult to bring it
down to specifics and impossible to implement. It is just something that has
been invented in retrospect to explain the success of some high-performing
groups

Culture
is a characteristic of a group whereas high-performance is an outcome that
depends on multiple factors. So it is misleading to speak about
high-performance work cultures. One should instead speak about high-performance
work systems

There
is no one culture that leads to high-performance

There
are cultural traits leading to high-performance that hold good across
organizations

We can
define a target high-performance culture and create it in a short period of
time

Culture
is something that evolves over a period of time and deepest levels of culture
consist of unconscious assumptions. It is not something that be ‘copied and
pasted’ on a group

To make sense out of this we need to
clarify what is ‘culture’ and what is ‘high-performance’. While there are multiple perspectives here
also, let us use the following as working definitions. A group is said to be
high-performing when it consistently achieves its goals. Culture is the ‘way we
do things around here’ – the recurring patterns of behavior in a group. If we
put these two definitions together, we can define a ‘high-performance culture’
as those recurring patterns of behavior in a group that enables the group to
consistently achieve its goals. So, the real question becomes ‘is there really a
set of such of behaviors that by itself lead to high performance of the group’?

If we have to understand the
functioning of groups, we have to look at both its hardware and software.
Hardware is the structure, policies, processes etc. Software is the people and
the culture. Often, problems at the hardware level get conveniently
misdiagnosed as software problems, because it is much easier to train people
and to run culture-building sessions as compared to making significant changes
in structure, policies and processes. So, if we have to have a high performing
group, both the hardware and the software have to be good and also in sync with
each other.

Most of the studies in the domain of
high-performance cultures list a set of characteristics and factors associated
with high-performance cultures. These characteristics and factors and their
relative importance vary across the different studies, Yes, sometimes they do
look like wish-lists and not like proven causal factors for high-performance
cultures. Nevertheless, it is instructive to take a look at them.

Some of the popular characteristics listed
are passion for excellence, shared understanding and buy-in to the organization
purpose, vision and goals, outward focus, decisiveness, sense of urgency, speed
and agility, sense of ownership and personal accountability on the part of all
the employees, discipline, diversity and inclusion, innovation and risk taking,
passion for learning and renewal etc. All these do seem reasonable. What is not
proved is whether these characteristics are causally linked to high-performance
or if they are just correlated with some of the high-performance situations.

Now let us look at the factors that the
studies on high-performance culture list as the ones responsible for
high-performance. They include high performance standards and benchmarks,
alignment of goals, high person-job fit, clarity of individual performance
goals coupled with real-time feedback, review and coaching mechanisms,
streamlined, and simplified processes and procedures, policies that enable and
not hinder performance, flatter organization structures, realigned competency
frameworks and incentive schemes to reinforce appropriate behaviors, high
degree of performance based differentiation in rewards, role modeling by the
leaders etc. Here again all these factors seem reasonable. But, they seem to be
part of any good performance management system and not something unique to
high-performance cultures.

May be, that exactly is the crux of the
issue. If these factors corresponding to good performance management are
coherently and consistently implemented, it will lead to high-performance. That
is, when these gets consistently done and get role modeled by the leaders, it
becomes ‘the way things get done’ and that is exactly the definition of culture
that we have been using! When these are also structurally reinforced by
appropriate structures, processes and policies they become sustainable. This
helps us to realize the true power and importance of performance management. The
performance management system, when properly designed and implemented, can be
the most effective culture building tool instead of being a collection of annoying
forms and formats!

Yes, spelling out what exactly is high
performance and what exactly is the target culture required in their particular
context would be helpful for a group to work towards high performance. High-performance
need not necessarily be relative. It is with respect to whatever goals a group
sets for itself though the group might refer to external performance benchmarks
before arriving at the its goals. Similarly, there is no one right blueprint for
culture as the culture that will lead to high-performance for a group will
depend on the group’s strategy, context and stage of evolution.

The most important thing here is to go
beyond broad statements of intent and empty platitudes. To make things we work,
we have to identify the few most important cultural characteristics that needs
to be changed and reinforced. We also need to keep in mind the
interrelationships, structural reinforcements and alignments. We must ensure
that the new cultural characteristics that we are trying to build is in
alignment with the core values of the organization. Another important enabler is
to remove impediments to high performance like ‘passive resistance’. All these,
when done consistently, becomes the way of life and hence fit to be called ‘culture’!

So where does this leave us? Yes, groups vary in terms of performance levels
and some of that variations in performance can be attributed to differences in
the patterns of behavior (culture) in the group. Since these groups function in
different contexts and with different goals, we can’t identify a single
blueprint for high-performance culture that will be valid across groups though
there could be some common characteristics and factors. Yes, in any group we
can examine the hardware and software of the group to see if they are optimized
and aligned for the achievement of the goals that the group has set for itself.
When we detect gaps in the same, steps can be taken to address the same. However,
these will often require fundamental changes in the functioning of the group
and that requires commitment and investment from the leaders for an extended
period of time. We must remember that what often differentiates a
high-performance culture is the intensity and rigor of the implementation and
not content of the culture! Unless the group is fully committed to the change,
in both letter and spirit, the changes can’t be implemented and sustained. After
all, a culture becomes real only when it is experienced!

I was a bit taken aback by what I just heard. I knew that often these kind
of ‘solutions’ will end in tears or worse. However, similar to what had
happened during my previous encounters with him, this interaction forced me to
think a bit more deeply about the underlying issue - the application of
OD(Organization Development) to the various functional areas in HR
(Human Resource Management). That, in turn, has prompted me to write this
series of posts on 'The OD Quest' where we will look at the
possibilities that arise when OD ventures into other parts
of the people management terrain.

Prima facie, OD and IR make strange bedfellows. Isn’t
IR the rough and tough side of HR whereas OD is the gentle and soft side
of HR? Doesn’t IR happen in the context of an essentially adversarial
relationship whereas OD assumes a win-win relationship. Isn’t IR about
tangibles (like wages and working conditions) whereas OD is about the
intangibles (like culture and values). Isn’t IR the bread and butter stuff
for HR while OD is more like the icing on the cake? Have you ever come across
an HR professional who is an expert in both IR & OD? Doesn’t
IR happen in reality of the shop floor whereas OD interventions typically
happen off-site locations that are as far away from the work reality as possible?
Aren’t
OD and IR two fields of study that are customarily separated in both theory and
practice?To me, these questions are based on the stereotypes of
IR and OD and are not based on reality (See Decoding the ‘IR mindset’ and ‘Organization Development Managers as Court Jesters’
for more details). Yes, these stereotypes have existed for such a long
time that they have become some sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy. After all
(organization) reality is socially constructed to a large extent. But if we go
beyond the outward appearances, significant possibilities for value addition
begin to emerge. Yes, in aspects like creating a congenial 'organization climate' (the perception and
attitudes of organizational members toward the organization that influence their
behavior in the organization),
the convergence between OD and IR are apparent whereas in other aspects we need
look more carefully to see the convergence.

Let’s start with the most typical (stereotypical?) part of IR –
collective bargaining leading to long-term settlements(LTS). There are often
significant disruptions (at least distractions) to work before the LTS is
signed. Also the productivity improvement clauses in LTS are often
notoriously difficult to implement. All these can be avoided if the process of
working towards, signing and implementing the LTS is carried out as an
integrated change management activity. Change management is the core skillset
in OD and hence OD can be of immense value this case.

Another important area
where OD can contribute to IR is Workers’ Participation in Management(WPM).
Most of the WPM efforts remain ineffective or superficial as insufficient attention
is given to the key enablers like working on the underlying assumptions and
attitudes (of workers and management towards each other), building communication,
trust and collaboration etc. OD can be of immense help in working on these
enablers and hence can enable real and effective participation(WPM).

Similarly OD can be of help when implementing
any sort of changes in the workplace (e.g. changes in production processes,
introduction of new equipment & technology, multiskilling etc.). OD’s behavioral
science foundation supports values of human potential, participation, and
development in addition to performance and competitive advantage. OD can
also help in promoting attitudes and behaviours that enhance quality and industrial
safety apart from creating better focus aspects like organizational justice (distributive, procedural &
interactive justice) and inclusion & inclusive development.

Yes, there is often some
inherent conflict in the union management relationship. However, conflicts
exists between various group of employees also (e.g. between various functions).
So the more effective way is to recognize the conflict and work on it and that
is an area where OD can definitely help (See ‘A
political paradox for HR and OD’ for a more detailed discussion).

IR
and OD have common theoretical roots in the domain of industrial sociology that examines the
direction and implications of trends in technological change, globalization,
labor markets, work organization, managerial practices and workplace relations.
Over the years behavioral scientists have deepened the understanding of the
ways that interpersonal, structural, and technological forces can affect
organizations and industrial relations. Increasing diversity in both the
characteristics of the labor force and the organization of work have blurred
the distinctions between blue collar jobs (traditional domain of IR) and white
collar jobs (traditional domain of OD). In general, workers with good education
and high occupational status are more likely to assert their interests
individually rather than through collective bargaining.All industrial
relations systems ultimately face the same fundamental issues : they must
devise policies and institutions that can meet workers’ expectations and
enhance productivity; they must also provide employees with a means of
expressing their needs at the workplace while offering steps for resolving the
conflicts that inevitably arise between workers and employers. The common need
to ensure the survival of the organization in a highly competitive market place
is putting increasing pressure on unions and management to jointly solve
complex problems and hence the ratio of ‘integrative bargaining (win-win)’ to ‘distributive
bargaining (win-lose)’ is increasing when it comes to collective bargaining. OD
is essentially about facilitating joint exploration and problem solving

It is interesting to note that there are fundamental similarities
between OD and IR in terms of the 'unit of work'. While most of the HR processes (e.g. recruitment,
performance management, career development etc.) impact the employees primarily
as individuals both OD and IR deal mostly with
groups. Understanding of the formation and evolution of groups and group
dynamics is key to both IR and OD. By the way, OD is not only useful
for the ‘management team’ of the but also for the unions. After all union
is essentially a group of people who have to work together. It can be argued
that the need for group cohesion is the highest for the unions as their power
(or even existence) comes from being able to act together as a group.

Where does this leave us? IR is not the antithesis of OD. IR is essentially
about balancing (in the dynamic sense) the economic efficiency of organizations
with equity, justice and the development of the individual to find ways of
avoiding, minimizing and resolving disputes and conflict and to promote
harmonious relations between and among the parties involved. OD can definitely
add value to IR – especially in terms of change management, facilitating
greater alignment with the vision, mission and values of the organization, enhancing
communication, collaboration, psychological commitment & trust and better sensing & management
of the group dynamics.

OD can enable IR (Industrial Relations) to transition to Employee
Relations (which goes beyond the collective bargaining level to include
non-union organizations also where dialogue might be between employers and
their employees, although with alternative bargaining structures) and then to
Employment Relations (that looks more broadly at employment and the forces that impact employment to enable greater cooperation between
management and employee to add value to the organization). Yes, for this his to
happen HR professionals need to go beyond the stereotypes about IR and OD and
look at the core of the domains. Yes, it also means that OD and IR
professionals have to spend more time working together! We must also remember
that even in those situations where there is really a ‘thesis’ and an
‘antithesis’, we can find often find a ‘synthesis’ that integrates the thesis
and antithesis at a higher level!

Any comments/thoughts before we take our OD quest to the next domain in the HR
land?!

I was a bit taken aback by what I just heard. I knew that often these kind
of ‘solutions’ will end in tears or worse. However, similar to what had
happened during my previous encounters with him, this interaction forced me to
think a bit more deeply about the underlying issue - the application of
OD(Organization Development) to the various functional areas in HR
(Human Resource Management). That, in turn, has prompted me to write this
series of posts on 'The OD Quest' where we will look at the
possibilities that arise when OD ventures into other parts
of the people management terrain.

In the first post in this series (see The OD Quest: Part 1- Mapping the terrain) we did a
cartography of the Human Resources (HR) and Organization Development (OD)
domains to map out the current world (the terrain) inhabited by HR and OD and
also the evolving worldviews in HR and OD (ways of looking at the terrain). In
the second post (see The OD Quest Part 2 : Doing Recruitment in the OD way) we
made a visit to the land of Recruitment and explored the value OD can add to
Recruitment. In the third post (see The
OD Quest: Part 3 – Rendezvous with L&D) we covered the Rendezvous with
L&D. In
this post, let’s take our OD Quest to the land of Rewards that is also known by
names like ‘Compensation & Benefits’ (C& B) and by more interesting ones
like ‘Monies & Goodies’. If we look at Rewards essentially in terms of compensation
surveys, compensation structures and benefits the possible value addition from
OD is not apparent with exception of facilitating deeper discussions around the
compensation philosophy (the ‘why’ of what we do in Compensation &a Benefits and its alignment with the company values). However, when we look at Rewards as a tool to drive appropriate
employee behaviors to achieve a particular set of business results, the
possible value addition from OD becomes
clearer.

Employee behaviors (and also employee engagement and
performance) are driven by the ‘total employee deal’ offered by the company that include (in addition
to compensation and benefits) factors like the organization culture, work
environment, development & growth, meaning & purpose etc. OD plays a
key role in enhancing these aspects. Most importantly, the underlying messages conveyed
by the Compensation & Benefits provided by the company must be in sync
with the messages conveyed by the other parts of the total employee deal. For example if an organization wants to provide a highly collaborative environment the Reward system should also support that.

One
of the ways to enhance the alignment between Rewards and OD is to jointly
create a coherent and internally consistent ‘Employee Value Proposition’ or a ‘Total
Rewards Statement’ that include all these dimensions. This would ensure better
integration between the transactional aspects (traditionally the domain of Compensation
& Benefits) and the relational aspects (traditionally the domain of OD) of
the total employee deal. Please see ‘Of Rewards, OD and Passing the buck’ for
more details. For example, it creates cognitive dissonance when the organization looks at salary purely as a 'matter of supply & demand' and at the same time wants the employees to develop a deep emotional connect with the organization beyond the rational connect (or even consider the organization as their extended family).

Reward systems must focus on what is valued in the organization (stated values of the organization). Clarifying these values is an area where OD can help. There must be a clear connection between the valued behaviors and the Rewards. Money speaks louder than words! So if there is a disconnect between the espoused values of the organization and what is actually rewarded, the employee behaviors would be influenced by what is rewarded. It is also a sure way to lose credibility and trust.

Another very important contribution that OD can make
is to better manage the formation and evolution of the psychological contract. While
salaries are more in the domain of the employment contract, the way salary
negotiations are conducted during the various phases of the employee life cycle
can have a huge impact on the formation and evolution of the psychological
contract and hence outcomes like employee engagement, performance and retention.
Please see ‘Of Salary negotiations and Psychological contract’ for more
details. Also, how Reward decisions are handled (especially when the organization
is not doing well or when the organization can afford to drive a hard bargain
with the employees) with both shape and reveal the organization culture and values.

OD can help in facilitating better change management around the changes made to compensation and benefits (especially on tricky ones like discontinuing a benefit or redesigning incentive/variable salary schemes to derive more value). Of course, it works the other way around also. When OD is driving an organization-wide change management effort, Rewards can be of immense help by rewarding the desired (new) behaviors/ways of working and hence facilitating them to take root. For example, if the organization wants to build a more performance-driven culture, increasing the level of differentiation in Rewards for the various levels of performance can be a key enabler.

So where does this leave us? OD can add a lot of value
to Rewards. OD can help Rewards to evolve from Compensation & Benefits to
Total Rewards! We can say that the application of OD makes Rewards better just like ‘sugar
sweetens milk’ in the famous story* about Parsis. Of course, it is important to
keep working on the Rewards & OD partnership to take it to higher levels of
excellence and to ensure that things doesn’t fall through the cracks (or fall
in ‘no man’s land’). Considering that we are on an OD quest and not a conquest continuous exploration of the possibilities of the Rewards and OD partnership definitely fits into the spirit of the OD quest!

The story goes something like this.:
Parsis came to India fleeing from persecution in their Motherland Iran and
landed in Gujarat. There they approached the local king Jadi Rana and requested
asylum. Jadi Rana motioned to a vessel of milk filled to the very brim to
signify that his kingdom was already full and could not accept refugees. In
response, one of the Parsi priests added a pinch of sugar to the milk, thus
indicating that they would not bring the vessel to overflowing and indeed make
the lives of the citizens sweeter. Jadi Rana gave shelter to the emigrants and
permitted them to practice their religion and traditions freely. Parsis are
still adding “sugar” to our lives!

Any comments/thoughts before we take our OD quest to the next domain in the HR
land?!

Monday, April 24, 2017

It is said that we discover some parts of ourselves only in the context of our interaction with others. Some of these interactions are so enriching that they leave us feeling more complete, integrated, alive and human. In this series of posts, we will look at the impressions from some of the remarkable encounters I have had. To be of greater relevance, I have grouped these interactions into categories based on roles. In the first post, we will look at my impressions from an encounter with a remarkable teacher.

I have learned much
from you, and it is not limited to what you have taught.

I have taken much
from you, but I haven't diminished you. A lamp that lights another lamp Is not
diminished in the process.

You taught straight
from the heart, with your deeds amplifying your words. True integrity is the
integration of thoughts, words and actions.

You gave me the courage to accept what I have known all
along and to stand on your shoulders to see what you never been able to see.
You gave me the benefit of doubt, perhaps more than what I deserved.

You encouraged me to experiment with new behaviors and
perspectives and to discover the joy of learning . You discovered potentials in
me that I could not recognize myself.

Yes, you have often cut me very deeply, to open up my
channels of learning. But you used a surgeon's blade and not a butcher's knife
and that too with infinite care and compassion.

You enabled me to be
more of myself with all my peculiarities. For it is in our sharpness and not in
our well-roundedness that we become unique and truly human as individuals.

You have demonstrated so beautifully that the teacher and
the student can learn together.

In a world with so much information and so little
understanding, a great teacher can indeed be the bridge from sight to insight.
Yes, I do feel blessed, in more ways than one, that our paths have crossed!

Friday, March 10, 2017

"I don’t have an opening in
my OD team now. But, you can join our recruitment team and do recruitment
in the OD way”, I heard the Senior HR Leader telling a candidate who was
hell-bent on joining the OD team. This was my fifth ‘encounter’ with this
gentleman (See 'Passion for work and anasakti
‘, 'Appropriate metaphors for
organizational commitment ‘ ,‘To name or not to name, that is the
question’ and ‘A Mathematical approach to HR’
for the outcomes of my previous interactions with him).I was a bit taken aback
by what I just heard. I knew that often these kind of ‘solutions’ will end
in tears or worse. However, similar to what had happened during my previous
encounters with him, this interaction forced me to think a bit more deeply
about the underlying issue - the application of OD(Organization
Development) to the various functional areas in HR (Human Resource
Management). That, in turn, has prompted me to write this series of posts on
'The OD Quest' where we will look at the possibilities that
arise when OD ventures into other parts of the people management
terrain.

In the first post in this series (see The OD Quest: Part 1- Mapping the terrain) we did a
cartography of the Human Resources (HR) and Organization Development (OD)
domains to map out the current world (the terrain) inhabited by HR and OD and
also the evolving worldviews in HR and OD (ways of looking at the terrain). In
the second post (see The OD Quest Part 2 : Doing Recruitment in the OD way) we
made a visit to the land of Recruitment and explored the value OD can add to
Recruitment. In this post, let’s take our OD Quest to one of OD’s closest neighbors
– Learning & Development (L&D) also known as ‘Training’ (though the
term ‘Training’ is becoming increasingly unfashionable especially for behavioral training)

OD and L&D (as opposed to
OD and Recruitment) are often considered
to be siblings or even twins. In some of the organizations they also live in the same house (function)
called 'Learning & OD'. When OD becomes more like OE/Organization Effectiveness that focuses more on the 'structural' dimension (e.g. Organization structure, job design, congruence of structural elements, workforce planning etc.) as opposed to the 'human process' dimension
and/or when L&D is clubbed with Technical/Functional Training, they are more likely to
live apart, in terms of the boxes and arrows in the organization chart, often with unfortunate consequences!

When it comes to the nature of
work, the boundary between OD and L&;D is not often clearly defined (and it
varies significantly across organizations). Typically, individual level
capability building is considered to be in the L&;D land and group and
organization level capability building is considered to be in the OD land. ‘Coaching’
is a hotly disputed territory between OD and L&D. Territorial disputes
also erupt when it comes to ‘change
management’/’mindset/culture change’ kind of training.

To me, the separation between OD and
L&D is arbitrary and counterproductive. Learning’ is defined as ‘sustainable
change in behavior’ and OD is about ‘facilitating change’. So, it is very
difficult to determine where one ends and the other begins. This is even more true these days when L&D has moved away from being primarily 'event-driven' and OD has moved away from 'conducting isolated ('hit and run')interventions'. Efforts to force a
separation between the two often leads to 'things falling through the cracks'. More
importantly, this can adversely affect the mutual value addition.

Let’s look at an example. One of the serious ‘crimes’ committed in the
L&D land is that of ‘Training the victim’ where problems at the strategy/structure/process/culture
levels are conveniently misdiagnosed as ‘capability issues’ and employees are sent
for remedial training to fix their capability gaps (see ‘Training the victim’
for details)!

A closer partnership between L&D and OD can improve the
quality of the diagnosis/need identification and also help in better change
management to sustain the ‘change in behavior’ and ‘transfer of learning’ as the
OD function often brings in excellent diagnosis and consulting skills. Also ,OD
can help a lot in terms of structuring the 70% (on the job learning) part of
the 70:20:10 learning model (see ‘Truths stretched too far’ for more details). Again, ‘Leadership Training’ often degenerates
into some sort of ‘Corporate Rain Dance’ (see 'Leadership Training and Corporate Rain Dance' for details). Partnership with OD can
help in addressing this also.

Similarly, large scale OD interventions often involve a lot of
capability building where L&D can help. Again the L&D function often
brings in significant program management capability that can be leveraged to enhance
the effectiveness of the roll out of change management initiatives.

A closer partnership between L&D and OD also ensures that
high impact domains like ‘coaching’ don’t fall through
the cracks and that they are effectively addressed. Another key area where the
collaboration between OD and L&D can add a lot of value is in enabling
employees to transition from one responsibility level to another responsibility
level that requires a different mindset in addition to a different skillset
(See ‘Accelerated learning & Rites of passage’ for a related discussion).

So where does this leave us? OD and L&D can add a lot of
value to each other. This works best when their ‘natural affinity’ (in terms of
nature of work) is maintained in terms of organization structure. Hence an HR
organization structure that combines the L&D and OD functions into ‘Learning
&OD’ is much more likely to be impactful. This also facilitates better
crosspollination of skillsets and a more integrated perspective!Any comments/thoughts before we take our OD quest to the next domain in the HR land?!

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About this blog

This blog is an attempt to arrive at the simplicity that is achieved by working through/wrestling with the complexities in life and work. While most of the posts here are on topics on which I have some sort of expertise, some of the posts might reflect a tendency to 'rush in where angels fear to tread'! There could also be cases similar to that of an 'n' dimensional 'animal' trying to swallow an 'n+m' dimensional object. The views expressed here are my own and they don't necessarily reflect the views of my employers (past, present or future!).